Tag Archives: Freeware

Open source software: Is it hype or just good software? Well, before we go into this question, we really need a definition. Let’s start with this good, basic definition of open source.

They say, Open source software is software for which the underlying code has been made available for users. Users are then able to read it or change it as they wish.This is a good definition. But how do we find good open source software, if such a thing exists?

Are you into country music? If so, do you remember a tune called Dust On The Bottleby David Lee Murphy? Well, the song is about this young lad, who goes to this country wine maker named Creal, for something to impress a young lady. And he pulled out a bottle of wine, covered with dust.

Let’s examine a couple lines from this song, and relate it to open source software. There might be a little dust on the bottle. But don’t let it fool ya ’bout what’s inside.So we get our first inkling about open source. It appears to be dusty on the surface, but it is good inside. And that is the problem. Not everyone has a person called Creal, to tell them what constitutes a good bottle of wine let alone good open source software.

Now let’s take another verse of the Murphy song, that gives us a better clue. There might be a little dust on the bottle. It’s one of those things that gets sweeter with time. Now before we get into this sweeter with timething, let me give you a bit of background, as to why I can speak on these things.

For several years, I was a software developer at Motorola, where I wore many hats. Three years of working with Oracle and Java, and three years of working with ASP.NET and SQL Server. In addition, I wore the hats of technical writer, project manager, business analyst, trainer, and six-sigma black belt. But I ran web servers for engineers, based upon the open source web server Apache, and scripted UNIX with Perl, another popular open source product. So let’s start this sweeter with time, with a product called Tomcat.

Tomcat is a Java product, which is under the Apache organization umbrella, and the source was initially donated by Sun Microsystems. Tomcat is basically used to be a java interface between databases, like Oracle, and a web server. There was a lot of rumble initially that Tomcat was really buggy. But when it was released as open source, the worldwide community of super coders went to work cleaning it up. Today this product is in the same class as any commercial equivalent. So it has gotten sweeter over time.

Another example of sweeter over timeis L.A.M.P. L.A.M.P. is a hybrid of four products, named LINUX, APACHE, MYSQL, and PHP. What we have is an operating system (LINUX being the open source version of UNIX), a web server (APACHE), a database (MYSQL, even though I consider POSTGRESQL to be just as good), and a scripting language (PHP).

Each of these products has been successful for many years. But together, they constitute a powerful combination, for running complete web applications, with dynamic (database) content.

Now there are a couple of points here, that need to be shared, so as not to see open source as cut and dry.

If you are running critical applications, make sure you give sufficient time, after a new architecture is introduced. So if Apache is going from 1 X to 2X, Tomcat from 5X to 6X, or Perl from 7 X to 8X, don’t be the first on the technology bandwagon. Wait until Apache 2.2 X, for example.

Insure there are software support companies available; it is it critical to get a fix right away. I know, for example, that MYSQL has service contracts available, from the commercial company that oversees the software.

I hope you enjoyed this short introduction to open source software. If you have any questions, please be sure to contact me, or leave post comments. I love hearing from open source enthusiasts – even those who also need to be converted.

Most computers usually run slow because of heavy applications being built these days, however before you blame your CPU for the slowdown, let us just say that many times a PC may slow down because of low RAM or improper usage of RAM.

You can fix the problem of low RAM by adding additional memory, but how do you fix improper usage of RAM?

However if you do not trust the cloud for data storage you are always better off keeping backups locally, if you have many documents on Google Docs, you can easily export them or sync them with your local documents.

The LTech Google Docs Backup provides users with an option to backup and download their documents to their local drive. You can choose between various options to backup Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations.

However this freeware will only work for Google Apps Premier and Education editions.

If you are a regular Google Docs user and Firefox, you can export your Google Documents too with a Greasemonkey script, you can find the script and other useful things in our earlier post: Getting the best out of Google Docs.

Many of us usually use the computers and laptops throughout the day including evenings and late nights, the darkness at nights cause computer screen to emit a glow that is not comfortable to look at.

However adjusting the contrast and color over and over again could be quite a hassle and we usually leave the settings the same throughout the day.

If you feel uncomfortable watching the computer screen at nights, a really useful and freeware software called F.lux is what you should definitely be using.

F.lux makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.

It’s even possible that you’re staying up too late because of your computer. You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better.

Flu.x will automatically detect your location and apply different color schemes based on the the time, however you can change the location and color settings to suit your own needs, by clicking on the Change settings button.

Flu.x will work on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac, they also have a version that will work on Linux.

Did you ever think to start out learning something on your own and haven’t found the right resources for it, for example you want to take up designing and you want to learn Photoshop, or learn java on your own?

Google does provide users with a good way to search and find resources, but do you want to skip through things and just download the right tutorial?

Free Tutorial for Me is a handy online service that indexes more than 38 million tutorials, but wait they do not do it themselves, they still use Google, however they only show PDF, PowerPoint presentations and documents in the results.

To view the tutorial just click on the view button next to the tutorial and it will load a internal viewer to load the PDF, document or presentation, so you do not even need to have any of these softwares installed on your computer to view them.

Definitely useful and worth using if you are looking for a site to search for tutorials.

You are probably aware that Windows Seven features a revamped taskbar (often called the Superbar). It’s possibly the most prominent change in Windows Seven and has received a lot of attention. While the Windows Seven Taskbar is definitely a big improvement over its predecessors there are a few nagging issues.

Taskbar Overlord is a simple hotkey application which enhances the Windows Seven taskbar by making a couple of small adjustments to it.

By default Windows Seven groups multiple instances of the same application together. If you click on the application icon in the taskbar, the thumbnail previews are displayed instead of restoring the last active window. This is pointless since the same thing can be achieved by hovering your pointer over the icon. Taskbar Overlord fixes this extremely annoying behaviour of Windows Seven Taskbar and forces it to restore the last active window on mouse click.

If you middle click on any icon (in the taskbar) a new instance of the program is created. Again, this not very useful since you can achieve the same thing through Shift+Click. Taskbar Overlord changes the default behaviour so that Middle Clicking on an icon closes all its windows.

Taskbar Overlord doesn’t do much yet goes a long way towards improving the Windows Seven experience. Once you get used to it, you will be forced to wonder why these functionalities aren’t built into Windows.

We all admire our music collection and arrange them carefully, however no matter how much we try, there may be duplicate copies of the same music in our collection.

Now we do have a choice of painfully sorting through each and every music file to find duplicates and then delete them, or then we could just use a tool to do the hard work for us.

If you decided to use a tool, Similarity is one we would suggest you to find & delete duplicate music and mp3 files. Similarity is a useful program that helps you to find and remove similar, duplicate musical files (MP3, WMA, OGG, ASF, WAV, FLAC, APE, WV) with the same or similar sound content, music tags (ID3,WMF,Vorbis).

You can adjust sensitivity of searching criteria to find exact or similar files. In this way it is possible to identify similarly titles with smaller differences. Duplicate files can be deleted or browsed.

Similarity Features

Three powerful comparing algorithms (content based, tags based and experimental).

One really cool feature in Linux distros as well as Mac is that they automatically display any plugged-in removable media on the desktop. This is a rather handy feature as it saves you the trouble of opening up (My)Computer .

Desktop Media is a freeware which brings this feature to Windows. It works with all sorts of removable media including CD/DVD drives, USB Drives and network drives. Additionally it gives you the option of adding shortcuts to Fixed Drives (hard disc partitions) and even Ram Discs on your desktop.
For removable media such as CD/DVD drives, the shortcut will be displayed on the desktop only if a disc is present.

Desktop Media also provides a couple of other handy features including the ability to remember the icon positions, ignore specified drive letters and create Symbollic Links instead of Shortcuts. It effortlessly integrates with your Windows installation and even works with Icon Packs. This is definitely going to be appreciated by those who like to have a pretty looking desktop.

Desktop Media is a tiny download (354 KB) and has an extremely small memory footprint(less than 4 MB). I love it because it performs a specific task and performs it well.
[ Download Desktop Media ]